Cool animation of how Pangaea broke up. Runs backward and forward. Some good accompanying illustrations.

Cons

Very cursory descriptions. Focuses on the motion of continents to the exclusion of any detail of how they have changed.

Bottom Line

Pangaea is simplistic and short on details, but provides a compelling animation of how the supercontinent Pangaea broke up to form the continents we know today.

Around 200 million years ago, our world consisted of just one major landmass, the supercontinent Pangaea. Pangaea (for iPhone) gives you an animated look at how this continent broke apart to eventually form today's geography. It's a simple app, weak on details and descriptions but nonetheless compelling in its visual depiction of the continents drawing apart.

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Pangaea is listed on iTunes as an app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but it was clearly designed for the smaller devices, as it runs at 2x size in the iPad . That said, it runs fine on an iPad as well.

Pangaea in Motion
Pangaea is the essence of simplicity. The screen is dominated by a globe, with land masses depicted in yellow. You can drag your finger to the left or right to rotate it; swiping upwards takes you forward in time, and swiping downwards takes you backwards. Swiping slowly lets you move in 5-million-year increments; swiping quickly shows a complete animation.

You can go as far back as 200 million years, to the Triassic era. The longitude of the view, the period or era, and how far in the past the view isfor the Triassic view, it's given as 200 MA (which the Help screen tells you stands for mega-annum)are displayed at the bottom of the screen. The Triassic view identifies the modern continents by name, showing their location squashed together in Pangaea. The only notable landmass that's well away from the Pangaean supercontinent in that first view is Amuria, comprised of a part of northeast Asia including Mongolia, with southeast Asia as a group of islands below it. Also identified in this first view are Wrangelia, an island off the Mexican coast that would drift northward to join Alaska; and Tibet, an island northeast of India, that would drift northward to eventually get caught between Eurasia and India in a collision that would form the Himalayas.

Depending on where you are in the timeline, the top of the screen may display a message. For the Triassic view, the message is "Pangaea began to break apart." At the other end of the scale is "Earth as we know it today." Intermediate messages describe the separation of land masses, the formation of mountain ranges, the advent of glaciation, and more. Along with the message, some of the global views show a red dot identifying where the event is taking place. Some messages add an exclamation point; tapping it will bring up in illustration showing, for example, the interaction of tectonic plates.

At the very bottom of the screen, you can access the Help screen, which tells you how to use the controls, explains what "mega-annum" is, gives credits and references, and explains that the modern shapes of the continents are retained throughout time to help identify them.

The last point gave me pause, because it means that the Pangaea app does okay with the broad sweeps, but misses many non-trivial details. For instance, North America was bisected by a huge inland sea between about 80 and 100 million days ago, but you wouldn't know it from the app. EarthViewer (for iPad) includes the finer details of continental drift in its similar global journey through time, though to some extent all such depictions are approximate when you go far enough into the past.

A Notorious Breakup
Pangaea takes you back in time in which North America, South America, and Africa fit together like jigsaw pieces, with India, Antarctica, and Eurasia also connected to form one supercontinent. For better and for worse, the app focuses on the broad strokes, eschewing smaller, subcontinental changes to let the continents retain their modern shapes for easy identification as they separate, drift, and coalesce. The result is a simple visual teaching aid; its graphics lack details such as smaller-scale changes to the geography of continents, and the descriptions are cursory. Think of Pangaea as a tool to whet the appetite of students in the (literally) dynamic subjects of plate tectonics and continental drift.

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About the Author

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.
In addition to editing, T... See Full Bio

Pangaea (for iPhone)

Pangaea (for iPhone)

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